Kevin Gardner
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Wit and wordplay: ‘After You Were, I Am’ by Camille Ralphs
Kevin Gardner Divided into three discrete units, Camille Ralph’s After You Were, I Am (Faber, 2024) transports the reader into a warped revisioning of the seventeenth century. The first section […]
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The sound of hope: ‘Before We Go Any Further’ by Tristram Fane Saunders
Kevin Gardner Imbedded in the heart of Before We Go Any Further (Carcanet, 2023) is a wickedly subversive sequence, “Five Songs on a Cruel Instrument”, purporting to contain translations of […]
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Beauty before Age: on Seán Street, Michael Vince, & Tony Connor
Kevin Gardner The books reviewed here come from three well established and accomplished poets, whose first collections appeared, respectively, in 1976, 1978, and 1962. Unsurprisingly, all three opt for traditional […]
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Kingdoms of Earth and Sea: on Rishi Dastidar, Jane Draycott, and Ruth Padel
Kevin Gardner Three new and seemingly distinct collections by Rishi Dastidar, Jane Draycott, and Ruth Padel join their voices in opposing the kind of exceptionalism that deludes nations and their […]
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A primer on the nature of hearing: on Seán Street’s ‘The Sound Recordist’
Kevin Gardner As Britain’s first professor of radio, Seán Street (emeritus professor at Bournemouth University) brings to the writing of poetry a unique perspective on sound. The […]
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Fifty Forty: on the incomplete histories of Carcanet and the LRB
Kevin Gardner One of the most pleasurable of readerly experiences is the subversive frisson of snooping into the conversational intimacy of an author’s letters. When the initial […]